Tuesday, December 11, 2012

What if all the stars in the Milky Way were the size of ping pong balls and dropped into San Francisco?

Holy shit, this is going to come across as super Aspergy, but a while back, I read that the Milky Way galaxy has, at a minimum, 200 to 400 billion stars and I was thinking "That is an impressively large number. So large that I can't begin to fathom it." But then I thought "There has to be some way to fathom it. How big is 200 billion?"

THEN I thought "WHAT WOULD 200 BILLION PING PONG BALLS LOOK LIKE"

Then I took another hit off the bong. JUST KIDDING. It's actually fairly easy to figure out. The volume of a ping pong ball, according to this dork at Physics Forums, is 0.0000335m^3. That times 200 billion is 6,700,000. So 200 billion ping pong balls take up 6.7 million cubic meters.

Still can't picture that? I couldn't either. So I plopped them down onto Civic Center plaza.

So imagine we have a clear plexiglass structure with walls along Grove, Larkin, McAllister, and Polk. (It's plexiglass so you can see all the ping pong balls inside, duh.) If we fill this behemoth up with ping pong balls, how tall is it if there are 200 billion inside?

ANSWER: About 582 feet. Roughly the height of the Chevron tower at 575 Market. You know the one.

HOLY FUCK THAT'S A LOT OF PING PONG BALLS. So imagine that Chevron Tower walked its way down Market (causing unbelievable destruction and death in its wake, natch) and also imagine it just happens to be the exact same size as Civic Center Plaza (which it may or may not be, I don't know) and planted itself there in the plaza and instead of being full of office drones and computers and novelty coffee mugs was instead full of ping pong balls. That's the LOW END estimate for how many stars there are in the Milky Way.

About Me

TK lives and works in San Francisco. He occasionally travels to places east of the Caldecott Tunnel, but not very often. His interests include bars, reality TV, and irony. Things seem to be going fine.